Help Center Reporting Overview

How accurate is ad tracking and reporting?

Each impression, click and conversion is tracked via a unique URL. Data is recorded immediately into our data warehouse and stored for further analysis. The discrepancies between our reports and reports by your own web analytics are likely affected by these factors.

Ad Blockers

When your visitors use an ad blocking software on their computers, they see the web pages but no ad. Since they do not see ads, no impression is recorded in our system. An impression is recorded when a beacon, a tracking image, is successfully loaded into the browser. An impression is not yet recorded when the serving code is delivered. Ad blockers are designed to prevent images from loading and therefore the tracking image would not be requested from the visitor computer.

Definitions of Uniqueness

There might be discrepancies between the numbers reported by our system and other systems. Our unique impression number is defined as per visitor (IP address) per ad within 24 hours. For other system, it might be per visitor within another time interval other than a 24-hour period. If a visitor clears his/her cookie frequently, the unique counter will also increase.

Pageviews vs. Hits

Hits often include all objects (images, javascripts, CSS files) on the page. Thus, hits should be many times more than pageviews. For the purpose of comparing and checking reports, pageviews should be used instead of hits.

Collecting and Presenting Data

Numeric counters are recorded for every single impressions, clicks and conversions. On the other hand, detailed profile about your visitors are retained on a representative sample and frequently purged to protect visitor's privacy according to our Privacy Statement.

Fraudulent Activities

Your website can be targeted by someone to artificially inflate the numbers by automatically viewing or clicking on ads. Invalid clicks are considered one of the most serious issues to online advertising. Our system utilizes several layers of fraud prevention to protect data integrity.

Inflated Pageviews

The page view numbers can be inflated quite easily by refreshing the page again and again. In more advanced cases, a script/software can be written to request the same page(s) multiple times. If a page is not fully loaded before the browser is terminated, or an automated software to fetch a page then the ad will not be counted while the pageview counter will increase. To detect this, you can sort the web logs for the most frequently accessed IP addresses.

Investigation

If you would like us to investigate the reporting discrepancies, please describe the problem in details and send us the detailed report from the web analytics software for the affected period with daily breakdowns.

Other Articles in Overview

• Ad Interaction Tracking
• Click-Thru Rate (CTR)
• Gross Impression and Unique Impression
• How can I exclude deleted entities from stats reports?
• How can I subscribe to RSS stats feeds?
• How do I change the reporting period?
• How do I send the email statistic reports to my advertisers or myself?
• How is ad metrics in multiple zones calculated?
• Overall Report
• Raw/Gross Click and Unique Click
• What are different chart types?

Cannot find an answer for your question? Ask our Customer Care team

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